Reply to Aha moment - I know 7 current Ivy League students, and all of them happen to be legacies

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The problem as it relates to legacy, is that a main reason that the LMC and even UMC kids want to attend a Harvard is actually because of the legacies.  Nobody cares if Bill Gates' kids or [INSERT BILLIONAIRE HERE]'S kids didn't qualify for Harvard....they still come from billions and it is the opportunity to hobknob with those kids which makes it desirable to others.

From the NY Times:

"One group, however, got a big economic boost from going to elite schools: poor students, students of color and students whose parents didn’t have a college degree. And that’s because elite colleges connected them to students born into privilege — the very kind of student that legacy preferences admit in such large numbers."

"We might assume that legacy admissions help privileged students at the expense of underprivileged ones. But I would wager that legacy students, if eliminated, are far more likely to be replaced by other kinds of privileged students than by underprivileged ones. And in ways that are far less obvious, legacy students, with their deep social and cultural connections, are part of the reason less advantaged students get so much out of elite schools."

"Start by asking yourself what students get out of elite schools. I would like to believe that the most important benefit of these colleges is the exceptional knowledge that professors can deliver in the classroom. But if elite schools delivered special intellectual growth and professional training — what social scientists call human capital — privileged students would benefit greatly from them. And there’s no good evidence that they do."

"Instead, other forms of capital play a bigger role: symbolic capital (the value of being associated with prestigious institutions), social capital (the value of your network) and cultural capital (the value of exposure to high-status practices and mores). Graduating from an elite school pays off on all three counts: It affiliates you with an illustrious organization, offers you connections to people with friends in high places and acculturates you in the conventions and etiquette of high-status settings."

[/quote]
So, you admit that legacy is just a form of opportunity hording for the wealthy and mostly white, while they throw crumbs and URM and LC people?

Maybe Harvard is afraid that it would lose its cache if the well connected families had to send their kids to other colleges such that the network and social capital is not concentrated in a handful of colleges in this country.[/quote]

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